In Spain, alone among western nations, political theatre has arguably had a real impact upon the course of social and political change – yet it remains little noticed or assessed in other countries. This article examines the leading Spanish theatre groups which operated first in Franco's declining years, under strict though often incompetent government censorship, then in the period of transition to democracy – and now facing very different challenges under a nominally socialist government. The author. Eugène van Erven, who contributed a study of the popular theatre movement in the Philippines to NTQ 10, focuses in particular on the work of El Joglars (‘The Jesters’) from Barcelona – a company which, under the leadership of Albert Boadella, has been performing almost continuously since 1962. at first subverting the censorship by evolving a style of ‘politicized mime’, then through controversial works on overtly political themes, and more recently in a ‘provocative’ style intended to engage audiences in an active process of questioning the consumerist direction being taken by a democratic Spain.

The debate in NTQ about editing Shakespeare has engaged with the practices embodied in recent scholarly projects from the Oxford Complete Works (1986) to the continuing ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. The issues raised have been philosophical, concerning the nature of authorial subjectivity, and practical, concerning the interventions made by editors in manifestly corrupt or incomplete texts. Here, Gabriel Egan surveys the progress of the debate and responds in detail to Andrew Spong's defence in NTQ 45 of the principles embodied in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. Rejecting Spong's claim that editorial interference cannot be justified and that early printed texts must be ‘cordoned off’, Egan argues the necessity of explained interference based on ‘enabling fictions’ of authorial intention. Since all textual transmission is necessarily mediation, he argues that scrupulous explication of interference is called for, and that this is lacking in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ produced to date. Gabriel Egan is completing a PhD on Shakespearean original staging at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon.

Our inclusion in NTQ5 of a piece by the priest-playwright Karl Gaspar, recording his experiences of creating drama in a Philippine prison-camp, coincided with the overthrow of the Marcos regime – a revolution in whose preparation and support. Eugène van Erven now argues, the theatre played a significant part. In the following article, he describes the organization and work of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association – PETA for short – from its creation in the early 'seventies, to the fully-established network of companies and activities of the present day, and discusses its future role in a society not yet certain of the success of its revolution. Eugène van Erven is currently involved in a long-term project researching liberation theatre in the Third World, funded at present by his postdoctoral research fellowship in the Drama Studies Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His earlier publications have been in the field of contemporary western European political theatre, on which subject he was awarded his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Tennessee.

During the period of confusion and divided loyalties that followed the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the resources of the Moscow Art Theatre were severely depleted, and its artists and staff found themselves giving barebones performances for the enlightenment of often mystified working-class audiences. By 1919 the decision was taken to split the company, with a contingent sent out on tour with the intention of rejoining the parent group for the new season. In the event, with civil war raging between the forces of the Red Army and the White Guard, this did not happen, and groups of former members of the Art Theatre worked independently in the provinces and eventually abroad. While some returned to Moscow in 1922, the ‘Prague Group of the Moscow Art Theatre’ continued to lead an independent existence, and in this article Laurence Senelick traces the events leading up to and following its creation – which caused much annoyance to Stanislavsky and confusion in the West. A frequent contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the St George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and scholarship. His latest books are Stanislavsky: a Life in Letters (Routledge) and the forthcoming Soviet Theatre: a Documentary History (Yale University Press).

This article explores the role of theatre in the strategies of cultural diplomacy that developed in Italy between the last years of the liberal state (1919–22) and the rise of Benito Mussolini. It covers the period until 1927, when the establishment of the Istituti Italiani di Cultura (Italian Cultural Institutes) and the approval of a new regulatory framework for migration marked a new era for fascist soft-power ambitions. The article draws upon unpublished sources of the Historical Diplomatic Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and offers a new perspective on the use of theatre and the performing arts as a tool for cultural diplomacy through the testimony of such flagship authors as Luigi Pirandello, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Alfredo Casella, and Pietro Mascagni. Matteo Paoletti is a Senior Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bologna and part of the research project ‘Historia y patrimonio de la Argentina moderna’ with the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires. He was a Cultural Attaché at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and oversaw the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage for the Italian National Commission for UNESCO. His recent publications include ‘A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce’: Walter Mocchi and the Italian Musical Theatre Business in South America (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

David Allen's sequence of features for NTQ on modern British approaches to directing Chekhov began in No. 8 (1986) with a documentary study of Mike Alfreds's productions, and continued with a reconstruction of David Jones's production of Ivanov for the RSC in No. 15 (1988). Here, he explores the approach to Chekhov of Jonathan Miller (currently artistic director at the Old Vic), mainly through an analysis of Miller's production of Three Sisters, first seen at Guildford in April 1976, and subsequently transferred to the Cambridge Theatre, London, on 22 June of that year. This is complemented by original interview material with the director, and David Allen also draws on Miller's Chichester production of The Seagull in 1973, which was revived for Greenwich Theatre in January 1974. The analysis focuses especially on Miller's sense of the ways in which Chekhov perceived and dramatized human passions, his presentation of the nuances of personality, and of the changes wrought by passing time.

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

The ten-minute play is burgeoning in the United States, yet it is a phenomenon which has received virtually no critical attention. Here, a contributing playwright places the ten-minute play – and its cousin, the ‘overnight’ play – within an historical and theoretical context in order to examine the aesthetic and political implications of the genre. Rick Mitchell's discussion thus ranges between the history of the one-act play, Walter Benjamin's essay on storytelling, Bertolt Brecht's notions of ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simple’) pleasures and epic acting, Filippo Marinetti's writings on the variety theatre, and Chekhov's ideas about the strengths of the short, nonsensical, vaudeville farce. Rick Mitchell also relates his own recent experience in creating a ten-minute comedy, Acadiana Sludge – written, rehearsed, and performed (off-book) in less than twenty-four hours – and the text of this play augments the article. Rick Mitchell's other plays include Brecht in L.A., Ventriloquist Sex, Urban Renewal, Potlatch, and The Composition of Herman Melville, recently published by Intellect Books. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he directs the Northridge Playwrights Workshop, and he has published numerous articles about performance, theory, and playwriting.

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).

In exploring the repertoire of farce from its nineteenth-century exponents in France and England through the ‘typically British’ pre- and post-war varieties at the Aldwych and the Whitehall, to the work of such contemporary exponents as Alan Ayckboum and Michael Frayn, Vera Gottlieb also analyzes the ways in which ‘mechanistic’ or ‘clockwork’ kinds of farce are philosophically akin to absurdist drama. She suggests that English approaches to Chekhov have overlaid his work with similar assumptions – as in the contention of Michael Frayn, himself both a Chekhov translator and a highly successful farceur, that Chekhov's characters are ‘reduced by their passions to the level of blind and inflexible machines’. In arguing that this is not the case, she elaborates a crucial distinction between farces which, in effect, assume the impotence of human aspirations, and those in which behaviour derives from character rather than from imposed situations, thus offering at least the potential for change. Vera Gottlieb is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982) and Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Chadwyck-Healey, 1984). She was also translator and director of A Chekhov Quartet, first seen at the New End Theatre, London, in 1990, and subsequently at the Chekhov Festival in Yalta and the GITIS Theatre in Moscow.

In a keynote address delivered at the Michael Chekhov symposium ‘Theatre of the Future?’, held at Dartington Hall in November 2005, Andrei Kirillov argued that Chekhov’s ideas have not yet been fully assimilated, pointing out that merely to follow his exercises without understanding their connection to the actor’s imagination and meditative as well as spiritual dimensions is to fail fully to understand him. Andrei Kirillov is a researcher and Assistant Chair at the Theatre Department of the Russian Institute of the History of the Arts. His numerous publications on the history and theory of Russian theatre include Michael Chekhov: the Path of the Actor, co-edited with Bella Merlin (2005), and Teatr Mikhaila Chekhova: Russkoye Akterskoye Iskusstvo XX veca (The Theatre of Michael Chekhov: the Art of Russian Acting in the Twentieth Century, 1993). Bella Merlin originally enhanced the English-language version of this lecture, and with the author’s approval it has been further edited by NTQ for publication.

Although a good deal of his work was seen in London and New York, the name of Max Reinhardt remains for most English-speaking theatre students all-too-vaguely associated with those innovations which helped to give a new importance to the ‘totality’ of the relationship between actors, audience, stage lighting and design, movement and music, in the earlier part of this century. Even less is known here about one of Reinhardt's leading collaborators. Ernst Stern – the longest-serving, most versatile, and most professional of his designers. Yet Stern settled in England in 1933, and left his papers to the Victoria and Albert Museum, upon whose resources Hugh Rorrison has drawn in assembling this view of Stern's contribution to Reinhardt's theatre in particular, and to twentieth-Century scenography in general. Hugh Rorrison, who was a regular contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, teaches in the Department of German of the University of Leeds.

Defiantly, Nicaragua mounted its International Theatre Festival in 1986 while the country remained on a war footing against the contras and their American backers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe were invited, and found the experience very different from other such occasions, east or west. Despite problems of logistics – which left the company without their equipment for much of the visit and virtually having to camp-out in an American-owned hotel – the experience, as recorded here by Daniel Chumley, who has been an actor and director with the group since 1968. was finally and triumphantly affirmative.

Taryn Storey believes that a series of letters recently discovered in the archive of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) makes it important that we reassess the genesis of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Dating from November 1952, the correspondence between George Devine and William Emrys Williams, the Secretary General of the ACGB, offers an insight into a professional and personal relationship that was to have a profound influence on the emerging Arts Council policy for drama. Storey makes the case that in 1953 Devine not only shaped his Royal Court proposal to fit the priorities of the ACGB Drama Panel, but that Devine and senior members of the ACGB then collaborated to ensure that the proposal became a key part of Arts Council strategic planning. Furthermore, she puts forward the argument that the relationship between Devine and Williams was instrumental to new writing and innovation becoming central to the future rationale for state subsidy to the theatre. Taryn Storey is a doctoral student at the University of Reading. Her PhD thesis examines the relationship between practice and policy in the development of new writing in post-war British theatre, and forms part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Giving Voice to the Nation: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre and Performance in Britain 1945–1995’, a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Craiova International Shakespeare Festival has been a major touchstone in Europe for theatre artists, theatregoers, and scholars for nearly two decades. This overview briefly situates the Festival historically, indicating the ideals and perspectives developed for it by its founder Emil Boroghina, former director of the National Theatre of Craiova. It identifies as well a number of the Festival's many highlights over the years, Romanian as well as international, and focuses on examples from the 2012 programme, including Silviu Purcarte's The Tempest and Robert Wilson's Shakespeare's Sonnets performed by the Berliner Ensemble. Attention is drawn to the presence at the successive editions of the Festival of productions directed by Purcarete, who established his career at the National Theatre of Craiova, to which Boroghina had invited him, and who won international fame after performances of his Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival. Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

In this article Patricia Lufkin examines the work of Margaret Macnamara, a remarkable feminist playwright whose work has fallen into obscurity but who deserves attention as an important female participant in the Independent Theatre Movement and the Fabian Society. Macnamara’s associations and collaborations with key figures of the time, including George Bernard Shaw, are explored, and her progressive thought and participation in key organizations demonstrated. Importantly, Lufkin analyzes Macnamara’s play The Gates of the Morning (1908), highlighting its feminist critique of religion and its patriarchal influence. The critical response to her work was mixed, yet both positive and hostile reviews acknowledged that the play was a competent and stirring example of the new drama of progressive ideas, and helped to bring the ‘woman question’ to the forefront of people’s minds. Patricia Lufkin received her PhD from Louisiana State University, and is now teaching at Arkansas State University Mid-South. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century British theatre, most significantly on the life and work of Macnamara and Samuel Beckett.

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.